Scale Without Sameness

About ten years ago, I was part of a team launching club sports organizations in basketball and volleyball as part of a national organization.

We had a theory about how to scale. Define a programming methodology, a specific way the sports experience would be delivered, and have every club deliver it. The same experience for athletes. The same experience for parents. In our minds, it was the youth sports version of Chick-fil-A.

It made sense to us. Consistency is easier to explain, easier to train, and easier to scale.

Then I met with a local leader.

He had launched a basketball program in his community, and it was growing. He was also running it differently than the methodology we had decided was the right one to scale.

At first, I assumed the problem to solve was, how do we get him to do it our way?

After a lot of conversations and a lot of observation, I realized I had it backwards.

His struggles managing the growth weren’t because he needed our methodology. The more time I spent with him and his program, the clearer it became that the programming wasn’t the problem. He and his coaches were delivering the sports experience, and they were doing it well. What he wanted was a larger partner who could help with the organizational and operational structure of running a youth sports club.

The thing we thought would unlock growth may have been the obstacle. The methodology wasn’t what was best for his club. It was what was best for our standardization and our scale model at corporate.

Two different kinds of help

There are two different kinds of work inside a club that we often treat as though they’re the same.

One is designing the experience: the coaching, the programming, the culture, what development means for the athletes and families you serve. The other is building the organization around it: the structure, systems, and capabilities that let a club operate, grow, and sustain itself.

Local leaders are closest to the first. They know their families, their coaches, their athletes, and their communities in ways a national organization rarely can. The second is where they tend to be on their own. Even a successful club usually isn’t big enough to justify specialists in every function it now needs, and a new club faces the same problem.

We were offering help with the part he had already figured out, and not fully delivering the part he actually needed.

The part nobody sees

The question, then, isn’t whether everything should stay local. It’s deciding which things benefit from scale and which benefit from proximity.

I think about Barnes & Noble in this context.

When James Daunt became CEO in 2019, the company began giving store managers more control over how books were displayed and merchandised, instead of managing them through planograms from New York. The initial buying of new titles remained centralized. Store managers had much more control over where books were placed and how many additional copies to order based on what their own customers wanted. It was part of a broader turnaround, and an approach Daunt had used earlier at Waterstones in the UK.

I’m not suggesting a bookstore is the same as a youth sports club. But the structure is useful. The part customers never see was largely shared. The part they experience was shaped locally.

Share

This isn’t risk-free

Shared capability pulls toward sameness.

A shared technology platform, a shared vendor, a shared payment structure: each of them shapes what a club can do. Over time, the shared layer can start dictating the experience, and a partnership becomes franchising by another name. I know how easy this drift can be because I was part of it.

So the important design decision isn’t simply what can be shared. It’s what should be shared, and what should remain deliberately local.

Clubs don’t need to build purchasing power on their own. Neither do they need to solve payment processing, administrative systems, technology, vendor relationships, or specialized expertise independently. Brand partnerships are a good example: few clubs have the scale or time to initiate, negotiate, execute, and report on an activation well on their own, but sharing that work doesn’t have to change what makes each club distinct.

Mission can be different. Culture can be different. Coaching philosophy, programming, how a club defines development, and which families it chooses to serve can all be different.

The goal isn’t to prevent the shared layer from influencing the club. That’s unrealistic. It’s to keep shared capabilities in service of the club’s mission, rather than allowing the shared layer to gradually determine the mission, culture, and experience.

I should say plainly that this isn’t a neutral observation. It’s the thinking behind what I’m building with LnUP.

Independent clubs shouldn’t have to choose between staying independent but under-resourced and becoming professionalized but standardized.

Share capabilities. Preserve independence.

The future of independent youth sports may not belong to the clubs that figure out how to do everything themselves. It may belong to the clubs that get very clear about what must remain uniquely theirs, and become much more willing to share everything that doesn’t.

The leader I met understood that ten years ago.

It took me a while longer.